TEST ING T IMES
here’s a reckoning coming. After two consecutive years when exams were done very differently during the pandemic, things are starting Examining the exam results WI TH SO MANY QUEST ION MARKS AROUND GCSE AND A- LEVEL GRADES DUR ING THE PANDEMIC, THERE I S A DESPERATE NEED TO RETURN TO SOME SORT OF NORMAL I TY T
growing dismay, has started to feel like ancient history. After the world turned upside down, these high-stakes 16+ and 18+ exams were replaced – after much discussion – with alternative methods of assessment. In 2020, outcry followed outcry, as government ministers havered about what to do – and how to be fair to pupils in those crucial exam years, when they had already suffered so much. Robbed of vital classroom experiences and in-person teaching, deprived of seeing their friends and effectively under house arrest during lockdown, they had to put their childhoods on hold. Schools were asked to provide GCSE and A-level grades for students, based (as far as possible) on how they would have done had they sat their exams. The trouble came after the numbers were reassessed using some advanced number crunching by exam boards. After much criticism about the resulting unfairness, with bright, diligent pupils losing places at top universities after missing out on excellent grades they could reasonably have been expected to get in normal times, the results were declared null and void and withdrawn. New grades, based on
cancelled for two years running (2020 and 2021). Currently, the plan is to hold them again this summer. Many teachers have made their dissatisfaction known. How, they ask, can you compare schools, when children will have had such different experiences during the pandemic? As with SATs, the last time that GCSEs and A-levels happened in the customary way was 2019. That familiar summer ritual: children filing into sports halls, turning over the paper and either getting stuck in, or reading the questions with
to get back to normal – and about time, too. Extraordinary though it seems, this summer it will have been three years since the way that children were assessed at every school stage was turned on its head. At primary level, SATs assessments – normally held in the summer term and used to measure progress in literacy and numeracy, while evaluating how the schools themselves are performing – were
18 SPR ING / SUMMER 2022
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